Roman nudes and athletics.

Roman nudes and athletics. CHRISTOPHER H. HALLETT. The Roman Nude: Heroic Portrait Statuary200 BC-AD 300 (Oxford Studies in Ancient Culture and Presentation).xxii+391 pages, 12 figures, 160 plates. 2005. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress; 0-19-924049-3 hardback 80 [pounds sterling]. ZAHRA NEWBY NEWBY No Evil Will Befall You . Greek Athletics in the Roman World.. Victory andVirtue (Oxford Studies in Ancient Culture and Presentation). xiv+314pages, 87 b&w illustrations, 9 colour plates. 2005. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press; 0-19-927930-6 hardback 80 [pounds sterling]. Many years ago, in a humorous radio programme, the late Frank Muirbuilt an anecdote around a misheard quotation. No nudes is good nudeswould however make a useful sub-text for both these volumes, dealing asthey do with aspects of Roman society that were always problematic tothe R omans themselves; problematic but inescapable, because bothartistically and culturally Rome built on the Greek experience. Hallett's book is limited by its subtitle. It is concernedwith Heroic Portrait Statuary, so nudity in other media is notdiscussed, nor what are clearly erotic images like those of the Warrencup. The nudes discussed take themselves (and their audience)repulsively seriously. Nevertheless Hallett at last makes sense of whatfor most writers has been merely an aberration to be dismissed asepitomising the bad taste of boorish boor¡¤ish?adj.Resembling or characteristic of a boor; rude and clumsy in behavior.boorish¡¤ly adv. barbarians in the Hellenisticworld. Such well-known statues as the nude 'Pseudo-Athlete'from Delos and the half-draped 'Tivoli General' use divine orheroic imagery as a metaphor for virtues in the same way that a funeraryoration or a gravestone would employ words. In fact it has long seemedto this reviewer that there is a correspondence bet ween encomia such asTacitus' on his father-in-law Agricola and the use of images ofheroes in the early Imperial Roman army; Hallett shows that thisidentification was more widespread. We tend to think of the Greeks often going about nude, but ofcourse Greek nudity was confined to the baths, the gymnasium, therunning track ... and the bedroom. Artistically it is to be seen on thebattlefield but here it already had metaphorical connotations.Hellenistic rulers from Alexander, who self-promoted himself as Achilles(around whose tomb he actually ran stark naked) followed suit, in theirartistic manifestations as saviours of quasi divine power. Hallett has certainly broken new ground in his consideration ofnude or half-draped emperors. Images of Octavian, like those of earlierRepublican warlords, follow the Hellenistic tradition, which manifestlyequates heroic virtue with present power. However, the creation of thePrincipate Prin´ci`paten. 1. Principality; supreme rule. was to initiate a change. Save in the case of cameos createdfor a very select audience in the immediate circle of the ruler, wherealmost anything could be shown, it was held that a nude figure of anemperor was likely to be posthumous, in other words Adv. 1. in other words - otherwise stated; "in other words, we are broke"put differently to imply the emperorhad become a god. In Hallett's re-reading, images of Augustus asMercury, or of Claudius as Jupiter, or even of Commodus or Caracalla asHercules, merely implied that the ruler had taken on the virtues of thegod. Nero or Commodus may have been unfit to rule but if so it was notbecause of sculptures which flattered them in this way. In a way other Romans were doing the same thing; the statues ofAntinoos which generally unsympathetic writers such as Kenneth Clarkhave admired, are actually more closely aligned to a widespreadtradition than generally realised; only here, the cascading hair andmournful visage of heart-stopping beauty is actually fitted to anappropriately youthful body of Apollo or Dionysos. Ancient society was, on the whole, depressingly masculine (asNewby's book further emphasises). However Hallett does touch on thefemale nude in one instance. Although Roman women never appeared nude inpublic, they were occasionally depicted in the nude as Venus, in orderto emphasise their beauty. Hallett confines his survey to statuary, butthe representation of the birth of Venus from the 'House of theMarine Venus' at Pompeii has personalised features and coiffure coiffure:see hairdressing. while it is clear that a number of cameos carved in the third centurymake the equation between 'beautiful girl' and goddess too. The tradition of nudity lasts until Constantine but hardly beyond,though a nude image of Constantine still stood atop his column inConstantinople into the Middle Ages. Revival of the nude ruler had toawait the Renaissance and modern times. Hallett makes the pertinentpoint that our own di sgust with the concept must owe not a little to themisuse of heroic nude statuary by dictators such as Napoleon andMussolini. Zahra Newby's book clearly has a relationship toHallett's but it diverges on one point. A nude statue might have apurely metaphorical significance, but it might suggest that the subjectaspired to have a well-toned body. In bath and palaestra, figures ofathletes in stone and mosaic pointed to the adoption by Romans of Greekways. We have accounts of the popularity of athletics in Gaul as well asItaly and artistic evidence is widespread, indeed wider than Newbyallows. If she had, for example, looked at glyptic glyp¡¤tic?adj.Of or relating to engraving or carving, especially on precious stones.[Greek gluptikos, from gluptos, carved, from gluphein, to carve; see evidence she wouldhave found representations of athletes in Northern Gaul and in Britainas far north as Silsden in East Yorkshire: there a representation of anapoxyomenus with strigil strig¡¤il?n .An instrument used in ancient Greece and Rome for scraping the skin after a bath.[Latin strigilis; see streig- in Indo-European roots.] , attests the enthusiasm of members of localelites for Greco-Roman culture possibly in response to their own travelsto the Mediterranean world. It is true that there was a chorus ofdisapproval from Pliny and other members of the Senate, with regard toathletics, mainly on the grounds that stripping naked encouragedpederasty The criminal offense of unnatural copulation between men.The term pederasty is usually defined as anal intercourse of a man with a boy. Pederasty is a form of Sodomy. . It goes without saying that these same moralists were silentabout the real obscenity of gladiatorial and wild-beast fights in theamphitheatre. However, even if for the most part we do not find Romansperforming as athletes, they generally remained more than willing towatch Greeks and others doing so. Greek (nude) athletics were never partof regular Roman m ilitary training, though one wonders what young Romanseducated at Greek universities (amongst them Agricola again) actuallygot up to, despite the priggish Tacitus' protestations of thewholesomeness of the place. In private, within the villa, Romans might delight in statues ofbeautiful athletes or homoerotic ho¡¤mo¡¤e¡¤rot¡¤ic?adj.1. Of or concerning homosexual love and desire.2. Tending to arouse such desire.Adj. 1. liaisons with beautiful slave-boys,mythologized as Ganymede, and such predilections even reached up to theemperor himself in the case of Tiberius and Domitian. Glamorous youngathletes were frequently presented in art, especially statuary. DioChrysostom in the late first century extolled the beauty of the youthfulephebe e¡¤phebe? also e¡¤phe¡¤busn. pl. e¡¤phebes also e¡¤phe¡¤biA youth between 18 and 20 years of age in ancient Greece.[Latin eph but this has more of a resonance with the culture of the GreekEast where athletics remained an essential part of the et hos. In Athens, the ephebeia provided a clear link with the glory daysof the Classical age, and remained central to the education of well-borncitizens. In Sparta, the agoge were a matter of pride and new events andcompetitions like the whipping contests in the temple of Artemis Temple of Artemis (Diana)in Ephesus, Asia Minor; one of the seven wonders of the world. [Gk. Arch.: Benét, 918]See : Wonders, Architectural Orthiawere evidently Roman period inventions. For those accustomed to therules of modern sport, those of the Greeks, especially wrestling andboxing as brought together in the pancration were violent. Even if theydid not often approach the bloodletting bloodletting,also called bleeding, practice of drawing blood from the body in the treatment of disease. General bloodletting consists of the abstraction of blood by incision into an artery (arteriotomy) or vein (venesection, or phlebotomy). and slaughter of the Romanarena, they sometimes did end in death and may have appealed to the sameaudience. Perhaps the Greeks were right that athletics providedexcellent military training. At a time in the third century whenbarbarian raids were defeating Roman army after Roman army, P. HerenniusDexippus, who had been aganothete of the Panathenaic festival in 255/6,led out an Athenian war band and shattered the Herulian Goths who wereattacking the city. For writers of the Second Sophistic such asPausanias, athletic success in the Olympic games and other festivals wascentral to Hellenic identity, and this was true beyond Greece proper andinto Asia Minor. Both books are very well illustrated (if the black and whitephotographs are often grainy) and Newby has attractive colourphotographs of wall-paintings and mosaics mainly of brawnier sports.Both are solid works of scholarship but Newby's style, more relaxedand less like a thesis, is rather more appealing. Together both authorsremind us of the hard and physical aspect of ancient culture, too of tencentred on warlike war¡¤like?adj.1. Belligerent; hostile.2. a. Of or relating to war; martial.b. Indicative of or threatening war.warlikeAdjective1. competitiveness. Even in the gymnasium a beautifulephebe is only a future fighting machine. Statues displayed in baths andpalaestra included Myron's Discobolos, Lyssipus' Apoxyomenusand what were in truth athletes in mythologized form such as theHercules Farnese (again attributed to Lysippus) or an Achilles afterPolycieitus, based on his so-called 'canon'. In this butch,men's room atmosphere there could be no place for femininity exceptin the case of sex-symbol goddesses like Venus. The female athleticperformers on the Piazza Armerina mosaic seem to me fairly close toputting on a sex show, rather than displaying feminine beauty in its ownright. They are merely showing their bodies for the delectation of men.Thus if for the Classicist clas¡¤si¡¤cist?n.1. One versed in the classics; a classical scholar.2. An adherent of cl assicism.3. An advocate of the study of ancient Greek and Latin.Noun 1. these are useful contributions to a fairlynarrow field of interest, for a wider audience they are, or should be, apart of a devastating critique of the darkness and vacuity va¡¤cu¡¤i¡¤ty?n. pl. vac¡¤u¡¤i¡¤ties1. Total absence of matter; emptiness.2. An empty space; a vacuum.3. Total lack of ideas; emptiness of mind.4. at the veryheart of the cultures of Greece and Rome. Martin Henig, Wolfson College, Oxford, UK (Email:martin.henig@arch.ox.ac.uk)